Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 104, No. 4 & 5. Whole No. 633 & 634, October 1994

by Doug Allyn

  Cherubic PC Dennis took my statement, and he and Stan measured the tree and charted its position in relation to the body and the front of the house, with Dennis photographing everything for good measure.

  Once I told them what little I could, there was — for me, at least — an awkward pause. PC Dennis and Stan Ethrington had to wait for County HQ to send a mobile crane, unlikely to appear swiftly on a Sunday. “If I don’t get some sleep soon,” I yawned, “I shall fall over. If you don’t need me any more...”

  “Off you go, sir,” said PC Dennis. But I didn’t, for a minute. Illogically, it seemed wrong to slope off and leave Ben Basgate, tragic Mr. Toad, pinned there waiting to be tidied away. “That’s his cap, it’s how I spotted him,” I said. “I’m afraid I moved it, picked it up, don’t know why.”

  “Not to worry,” said Stan. “Get home, Billy, you’ve done all you can.”

  And so I had. Though not the way that either of us meant, let alone understood.

  The inquest did not last long. Tom Oates, stilted and uneasy in his Sunday-best suit, gave evidence of identity, a pathologist stated that Benjamin Harold Basgate, a fifty-eight-year-old male, had died of multiple injuries. I gave my two-pennyworth about hearing the chopping noises and becoming aware of what Ben was doing.

  PC Dennis was surprisingly authoritative, though even younger-looking in the courtroom. He produced photographs of the monkey puzzle’s severed trunk, and a chart showing the tree upright, with a large V-shaped notch a couple of feet from the ground and another smaller one on the opposite side. “Deceased obviously intended to throw the tree, make it fall, that is, away from the house. Apparently he misjudged the amount of wood to leave in place, stepped back to judge the direction the tree would topple, and was crushed when it fell the wrong way.”

  Verdict: misadventure. Mr. Foster, the coroner, added a warning, “which I hope the press will promulgate” about the danger illustrated by the accident. It was a tragic reminder that tree felling was a task for professionals. The press, a girl trainee from the Drawbel Weekly News, blushed and nodded and scribbled away; some of us exchanged wry smiles. Charlie Foster’s son-in-law happens to run a landscape gardening business, timber felling a speciality. Still, the coroner’s point was valid...

  The funeral at St. Mary’s was better attended than I expected, a cynical view being that certain Drawbel citizens were pleased to see the back of Ben. Talking of which, Peter Stuckey was there with Iris — nothing like a service for the dead to bring British hypocrisy to life. Waiting to enter, I fell into conversation with Stuckey, a big, grizzled fellow with a face like a turnip lantern.

  Probably he guessed my thoughts about humbug, for he began defensively, “Never liked the chap, but nobody would have wished that on him. Bloody fool.” As with Stan Ethrington’s similar remark, Stuckey’s voice held more compassion than contempt.

  “Ben would be alive today if me and the missus had been home,” he asserted. “Blimey, if you could hear him all the way over to Petticoat Wood, we wouldn’t have missed it. I’d have been round in two shakes to stop him. He was breaking the law, right? But our Jenny’s just had her baby, the missus was on fire to see the first grandson. We set off before it was light, to get back in time for evening milking.”

  He’d solved a minor puzzle: why the busybody Stuckeys hadn’t intervened that morning. Then the roof of the hearse came into sight over the churchyard hedge, and we all trooped in.

  My attention wandered during the service. I spent much of it admiring Selina Grace. Her designer suit might be a little too much for a country funeral, but then Selina ran a boutique in Bristol and always dressed to the nines.

  The coffin stayed on trestles in the chancel when the service ended. Ben was to be cremated. Tom Oates and a trio of elderly strangers whom I took to be distant relatives left together. I fell into step beside Selina.

  “Poor Tom,” she murmured, “he looks dreadful.”

  “He’ll get over it.” He looked a damned sight better than he had last Sunday. But then so did I, no doubt.

  “That’s you all over, offhand, shrugging everything off. Tom loved that man. It’s hard to think of Ben as fatherly, more of a big kid himself, but he was Tom’s uncle — and Tom lost his own parents when he was young.”

  “True,” I agreed soothingly. And more quietly, “I must be responsible for every second message on your answering machine. We’ve got to talk.”

  Frowning, Selina whispered, “You do pick your moments. I’ll phone when I’m ready. Not today, I’ve got to help Tom, those doddery third cousins or whatever expect a funeral tea.” She hurried after them, disclosing rather a lot of elegant thigh while getting into the funeral director’s boxy limo.

  Trudging up the zigzag path through the trees, I loosened my black tie and undid the shirt collar. Tom Oates had invited me back to Monks Farm, too, but I’d lied about having to take a timed call from overseas. Funerals are bad enough, let alone the old-fashioned aftermath of tea and sandwiches and guarded jubilation over the mourners’ survival.

  Selfishly, I consigned Mr. Toad to the past, concentrating on Selina Grace and the fact that despite appearances, we were more than casual friends. Was it a simple reflex — until recently I had been celibate for a long while — or something deeper? And what did she want or expect or dread from me?

  Not for the first time, I decided that platonic relationships had a lot going for them. The drawback being that they are less fun... Half the trouble was that knowing myself best, I was deeply suspicious of my motives.

  Selina was gorgeous, and “spoken for,” as this part of the world says when a couple aren’t officially engaged yet might marry some day. That made her doubly interesting, God forgive me. I can resist anything save temptation, and the lure of the forbidden runs it a close second. I liked her a lot, it could be love, but initially at least, Selina had represented a challenge.

  I hadn’t chased her. We knew each other, that was all — for a time. Then the Arts Council sponsored a Year of Wessex Culture or some such nonsense. Selina and I found ourselves on a dim subcommittee charged with choosing a logo. I was Mr. Local Literature and she Ms. Fashion and Design. There’s nothing like shared dislike to foster intimacy, and the committee chairman was a pain’s pain. We got into the habit of adjourning to an Italian restaurant after suffering him, to slander the old fool.

  Committee meetings were held in Bristol. One evening I forgot about having to drive home and drank too much. Selina whisked me to her boutique in Park Street to sober me up with black coffee. The upshot being that neither of us got back to Drawbel that night.

  Since then there had been four or five discreet meetings at a motel on the far side of Bristol. We’d have a hell of a good time, then ruefully agree it was silly and pointless, and from Selina’s standpoint, a menace to her stable future. All very immature for thirty-mumble year olds. On the other hand, there was the chemistry... Both of us kept saying it couldn’t go on like this; but it and we did.

  The most frustrating feeling in the world is to worry about something indefinable.

  Days passed and Selina didn’t ring back. I fretted: an obvious diagnosis was bruised ego. However, I’ve lost count of attractive women who have tired of and dropped me; such treatment is not a male monopoly. So it wasn’t hurt feelings, sprained pride, or not only that. My malaise might have nothing to do with her.

  Imagine trying to grasp soap when your hands are wet. I kept getting flashes of that horrible Sunday morning, a mad montage of images: Mr. Toad partially visible under the tree, Tom Oates’s damaged hands after he strove to shift several times his own weight, and Ben’s pathetic cap resting on the windowsill. Somewhere in there was a message I could not get straight.

  The tragedy had got to me. Belatedly it registered that if I had been one of Mr. Toad’s few friends, the reverse was true. Acquaintances far outnumber my friends, and none of them spends much time around Drawbel.

  Clearly what I needed was a holiday. My agent
pestered me to go sailing in the Grenadines, a berth was going begging on the schooner he’d chartered, all it would cost was the fare to Barbados and a few pounds a day towards food and drink... I was all set until a producer friend offered an obscene amount of money to script-doctor a pilot show, so the vacation fell through. I’m still unsure whether I am glad or sorry about that. Because if the trip had been made, then Solly might never have confided in me...

  Three weeks after Ben Basgate’s funeral, I was still up there on my hillside, and the camping-gas ran out. The cottage has mains water and drainage but wood fires provide the heating and my cooking stove runs on butane gas.

  I keep running out because — this makes weird sense, if only to me — Solly Purchis keeps nagging me about always running out. He has a vulturine air, most appropriately. Solly urged me to keep a reserve cylinder, a spare. When the stove’s flame dwindled, I could hook up the reserve and get the empty one refilled.

  However, that involved buying a second cylinder. From Solly. He loves money so much that malicious pleasure is gained from refusing to listen to him. Local lore proclaims that he ran one and a half miles after a tourist in a sports car, having given him one penny too much in change for a road map. Solly sputters, “People round here will say anything — that feller went off with ten pence of mine.” (In Britain a ten-penny coin will not buy the cheapest postage stamp.) “And I only went to the crossroads, never no one and a half miles.”

  That afternoon I hefted the empty gas cylinder and pushed through the door of the lean-to beside the filling station, gritting my teeth at the prospect of Solly’s invariable sermon. He wrong-footed me by accepting the cylinder in silence, before rolling a fresh one out from behind the counter. It’s not a store, or doesn’t look it, that lean-to. More of a barn and workshop where he repairs garden tools and sharpens mowers.

  I was thankful for the truce. Solly Purchis broke it by grumbling, “I suppose you’re another as doesn’t want a chain saw.” He sounded bitterly resigned. One had to smile: such a novel pitch that I filed it away for a possible sketch about an anti-salesman desperate to be turned down.

  “That’s right,” I agreed, poker-faced. “Top marks, Solly.”

  “Daft, living in a wood and buying logs by the half-ton.” His voice trailed away. My logs are bought from Solly Purchis. He decided to plunge for a profit in the hand rather than several, come winter. “Top-of-the-line saw, Japanese, can’t say fairer nor that. Cut your own logs, eh? Let you have it at discount, fi — um, two and a half percent off.”

  For obvious reasons, not many customers chat to Solly. They get out in a hurry while their wallets are still in one piece. But I find him good value... “Not like you, keeping inventory on spec,” I teased. He is notorious for selling from catalogs before ordering the goods, sooner than have costly merchandise on his shelves.

  “Customer let me down. Speak no ill of the dead, but Mr. Basgate let me down good and proper. Ordered that saw, he did. My own fault, showing a bit of initiative, see. When there was all that fuss about his ruddy tree, him wanting it down, ol’ Pete Stuckey swearing he’d take him to court if he touched it... I sort of mentioned a chain saw was what he needed.

  “Should have kept my trap shut. He wasted hours of my good time, fiddle-faddling over which one to get. Wanted it light. Great paunch on him and arms like wet string, ’course it had to be light. Had to be powerful, though, to get the job done quick. I never asked for a deposit, more fool me. Trusting, I am. Never again.”

  “You should have been quicker off the mark. In fact, you probably got the poor devil killed,” I accused, half seriously. “He got sick of waiting and took an axe to the thing. Might be alive today if you hadn’t kept him waiting.”

  Solly’s face darkened. “There wasn’t no wait! Chap who delivers my paraffin, his brother works at a wholesale place down Yeovil, he could get me what Basgate wanted. I give him the cash the same day Mr. Basgate made his mind up. My driver brought it two days later. I phoned right away, that was the Saturday. ‘I’m busy now,’ he says, ‘and you don’t open Sundays. Tell you what, I shall be in first thing Monday.’ Fat chance, with what happened! Now I’m stuck with the ruddy thing.”

  Follow the impulse to tell Solly Purchis he was the most selfish, quietly despicable character to be found in a long day’s march, and he would be indignant. So I confirmed that I could get by without a chain saw and went home.

  You will think me remarkably dense, but hours passed before I asked myself why Ben Basgate had gone to all the trouble of chopping down the hated monkey puzzle when by waiting a day he could have let a machine do the work for him. A machine, moreover, that he had ordered for that purpose.

  All right, he was Mr. Toad, impatient, volatile, capricious. Yet as Solly Purchis had pointed out, he wasn’t a strong man. It had taken time to hack those notches into the trunk, and knowing Ben, his enthusiasm would have wilted after a few strokes and vanished once he began sweating.

  I had a drink, and another. Between one sip and the next, all those flashbacks assumed significance as never before.

  It was like staring at an overtly senseless pattern, nagged by a hunch that it is nothing of the kind — and then somebody turns the sheet of paper forty-five degrees and you marvel at not having recognised the picture of a faucet or a sleeping cat.

  The chat with Solly did that for me.

  Doubt over Ben wanting or even needing to take an axe to the monkey puzzle brought a replay of what I had seen. Okay, memory is treacherous, and I tend to embroider and adjust as time passes. It’s part of being a writer. But those pictures were branded into my mind by mental and emotional trauma.

  Start with Ben’s baseball cap, Mr. Toad’s headgear. Something made me grimace and wipe my fingers after picking it up off the ground. Now I fancied that I could feel the texture on my skin again: the strip of fabric inside the cap, where the brim met the rest of it, had been faintly greasy. Not sweat, since it wasn’t damp, exactly. I had touched hair oil.

  Ben was totally bald, so he didn’t use anything of that kind. Tom Oates, by contrast, soaked his hair in the stuff.

  Another snapshot from that Sunday morning: Tom’s hands after he had struggled with the tree and I dragged him away. They were scratched, bleeding, one knuckle raw. Unwarranted damage, I realised, for a few seconds’ exposure to abrasive bark and leaves.

  Hands... I tried to remember what Ben’s right hand looked like when I had made that futile check for a pulse. But I was looking away, eyes shut while my fingers rested on his wrist. Ben had been cremated, so there was no way of proving my new certainty that his palm would have been soft, unmarked, free of dirt or blisters.

  It was such a weird feeling to see Tom as a killer. As if he had suddenly sprouted an extra head while we played darts at the Huntsman. I knew he had killed Ben Basgate and yet part of me couldn’t believe that.

  He had, though.

  He’d killed his uncle and seen the trouble he was in and thought fast, improvised feverishly. Ben’s bluster about felling that tree had provided Tom with the seed of his plan.

  Just as I and every other local was aware, he knew that in the country, somebody is always watching. Only in cities can you count on being unseen. He had to work outdoors, and though Monks Farm is remote and secluded, there was always the chance of an early-morning poacher or hiker, a sharp-eyed shepherd or wandering child witnessing what he was up to. At the time they might think nothing of it, but once news of the “accident” got out, they would remember...

  So he’d jammed the trademark red baseball cap on his head. Anyone sighting him from a distance would assume they were watching the master of the house. If they came right up to the house while he toiled to stage the accident, then he was finished anyway, so a perfunctory disguise had been sufficient...

  Tom had felled the tree on top of a newly dead man, tossing the axe in beside him at the last moment. Then he’d thrown Ben’s cap down and slipped back to his bungalow. It need not have taken m
ore than a quarter of an hour, start to finish — Tom Oates was strong and adept, unlike poor Mr. Toad.

  And he’d had an unwitting accomplice in me.

  That was not the nastiest insight while I swirled scotch in the glass, unable to drink because I felt so sick. The worst part was that I couldn’t prove a thing.

  Toward dawn the following day, sleep out of the question, I crammed a few things into an overnight bag and fled to London.

  I must have been operating on automatic pilot along the M4 motorway, since I rolled past Hyde Park some hours later with no recollection of events since bumping down the track into Drawbel Valley.

  Tom? Tom Oates? He couldn’t have. But he did, and you know it. Round and round went the arguments.

  Tom had been distraught, that wasn’t acting. Or not wholly. And ever since, he had behaved like a man in shell shock. Selina Grace had been right, at the funeral, saying that he loved Ben Basgate. Old farmer Basgate, Ben’s dad, had taken orphan Tom in, but Ben was older brother and father figure rolled into one.

  The killer had lied and deceived, yet his grief was sincere: because he hadn’t planned to do away with Ben and had not wanted to. Somewhere on the Avon-Wiltshire border, zombie-driving over those undulating, ocean-roller hills, it came to me that not being able to make a case against Tom might be a good thing.

  Instinct told me that he was a killer but not a murderer. He did not belong in jail and he would punish himself harder than any court could decree.

  The only sane explanation was that for some reason he had snapped, lashing out at Ben — hence the skinned knuckle. Lost his temper in a flash (now I retrieved hazy memories of Tom having a hell of a temper as a kid) and been aghast at the result. They’d been out in the garden, Ben had been more than usually exasperating...

  I could even divine why Tom had covered up for himself. It wasn’t fear of prison, but a killer cannot benefit by his crime, and Tom Oates could not bear the prospect of Monks Farm being sold to strangers and barred to him forever.